So I played the first Batman game through because I wasn't sure if the story was going to lead into Arkham City and I thought maybe there's tricks you'd learn in the first one that they would assume you just know in the second.

This game was pretty good. The aspect I liked most about it was the stuff like a Hitman game where you have to sneak around and take down a room full of baddies all stealthy.

The brawler aspect of the game was okay, but the control system was a bit too simple and lacked control at times. I couldn't always predict which way Batman would go, I would just press 'strike' and the computer would pick which guy it wanted me to fight next. This was annoying in stages where you are fighting a bunch of thugs and a big guy occassionally rams through because I would end up in his path even though I wanted to fight a guy who wasn't in his charging path.

The game was fairly short, but that was probably a good thing because it was pretty repetative. The Batmanishness of it was excellent. I am not a big comic book guy, but I did enjoy all the fun trivia stuff. And they worked in lots of good characters.

Yes repetitive is the word. Fun game but some bits dragged (every scarecrow level for example) and not allowing you to have the full bat arsenal to begin with was a bit of a cheap way of limiting things. Still the stealth and inverted takedowns were incredibly fun and made you feel very Batman like.

Elitism is positing that your taste is equivalent to quality, you hate "Hamlet" does it make it "bad"? If you think so, you're one elite motherfucker.

Oh yeah, I felt like I was Batman every second of this game. There was immense joy in doing all those trademark Batman things like the inverted takedowns and gliding down from on high and kicking a dude in the face. And the bad guys were all depicted perfectly. I was really glad they went more along the lines of the 90s cartoon and not the Nolan movies (even though I like those).

I think if the brawler aspect of the game had been a bit more sophisticated the game wouldn't have felt so repetative. I found the brawling very easy and was just pressing one button over and over. Even in a Double Dragon game from 20 years ago there was more of a sense of strategy in the fighting in terms of dividing and conquering the bad guys and which guys you focus on first. With this you just jumped into a pile of dudes and started swinging your fists and you'd come out on top every time.

I think Arkham City fixed a few of the issues y'all are discussing. The combat feels much more fluid and responsive to me, and they've incorporated gadgets into the combat now, so that's a cool twist, not to mention a ton of new animations.